From the Indus to the Tigris

by H. W. Bellew

Sihdih, as the name implies, is a collection of three villages on the plain to which they give their name. Only one of them is now inhabited, the other two being in ruins. Very superior carpets are manufactured here, and they seem to fetch also very superior prices, to judge from those asked of us for some specimens we had selected. The fact is, the natural propensity of the merchants to overcharge the stranger, particularly the Britisher, who is always supposed to travel about with untold wealth, had been stimulated by the very liberal ideas of our Persian servants as to their own rights of perquisite or mudákhil, as it is termed; and prices were at once doubled or trebled, to the detriment of all parties, for we refrained from purchasing as freely as we would with fair dealing, the merchants lost an opportunity of ready profit, and our servants, the cause of the whole mischief, received but diminished returns, as the fruit of their greed and chicanery.

Our Afghan companions, who well knew the market price of these carpets, and had come prepared to lay in a stock of them for transport to Kandahar, were so disgusted at the be-ímáni, or want of conscience, on the part of the Persians, that they altogether refused to treat with them on the terms, and contented themselves by leaving an agent to purchase what they required after our departure, when prices would return to their normal rates. The evils of dastúrí in India are bad enough so far as they affect the foreigner, but here, under the name mudákhil, they are ten times worse. The dastúrí or customary perquisite taken by servants on all purchases made by their master through or with their cognisance, is usually limited to an anna in the rupee, or six and a quarter per cent., but the mudákhil, which may be rendered, “all that comes within grasp,” has no recognised limit, and ranges high or low, according to the conscience of the exactor and the weakness of his victim. With us, as our subsequent experience proved, it ranged from ten to three hundred per cent., and was an imposition from which, under the circumstances of the case, we could not escape.

The Sihdih júlagah or plain is a fertile valley running east and west, and presents a number of castellated villages along the hill skirts on either side. Its soil is light and gravelly, and in the vicinity of the villages the surface is covered with long strips of corn cultivation. The general slope of the land is to the west, in which direction it drains by a wide ravine that ultimately joins the Khusp river. The water of the kárez on which our camp was pitched proved too brackish to drink, and we were obliged to send to another kárez beyond the village for a fresh supply. The weather here was very changeable. North-westerly gusts of wind raised clouds of dust, and drove it in eddying drifts across the plain, till a thunderstorm with a smart fall of rain cleared the atmosphere, and allowed the sun to shine out a while before setting for the day.

We heard different accounts here of recent raids by the Turkmans, but the accounts were so conflicting that we could make nothing of them, more than that these slave-hunting freebooters were really on the road and somewhere in the vicinity. The people have such a terror of them that they cannot speak of them without evincing fear, and running off into extravagances as to their ferocity and irresistible prowess.

From Sihdih we marched ten miles to Rúm, and camped on the sloping bank of a brisk little hill stream draining westward, at a short distance from the village. Our route was mostly northward across the plain, but for the last two miles, on entering the hills, was north-eastward. Rúm is a miserable little village of seventy or eighty huts, clustered around a crumbling castle on the very brink of a hill torrent of no depth or width. It now only contains thirty families of wretchedly poor people, who have so far struggled through the great pressure of the famine. Last year, we were told, forty of the people died of starvation, and between twenty-five and thirty families emigrated in search of food. The remnant were so reduced and broken-hearted that they were unable to bury their dead decently, and merely deposited the bodies in shallow pits covered over with loose soil. I observed some broken skulls and human bones in the little stream washing the walls of the village, and noticed that the whole air of the locality was tainted with putrid odours from the insufficiently covered graves. From Rúm we marched twenty-two miles to Gháyn, and halted there two days. Our route for the first few miles was north-easterly up the course of the Rúm rivulet, and then northerly over a hilly tract, gradually rising up to a watershed at seven miles. The ridge runs east and west, and is about 6550 feet above the sea, and 964 feet above Sihdih. The rock is of friable brown slate, here and there crumbled into clay. The ascent up to the pass is very gradual, over a hillocky hollow between high hills. The surface is everywhere ploughed and sown with corn, and abounds in a variety of weeds, crocus, tulip, anemone, and other plants. We saw no villages, but the cultivation indicates their existence in the secluded nooks and dells around. The morning air was delightfully fresh, a hoar-frost whitened the ground, and our march was enlivened by the clear song of the nightingale and the familiar notes of the cuckoo.

The view from the watershed is very picturesque, and looks down in the distance upon the valley of Gháyn, which stretches east and west beyond a long vista of irregular hills of bare rock, flanked on either side by a high range streaked with snow at the summit.

The descent from the watershed is by a narrow stony path on the steep slope of the hill, down to a winding ravine at its foot. We followed this for some distance, passing three little hamlets with their orchards, saffron gardens, and mulberry plantations in successive little glens, and at about five miles from the watershed came to Kharwaj, a flourishing village of eighty or ninety houses, on the terminal slopes of a spur that causes the gully draining this hollow to make a considerable sweep. The people of this village are Saggids, and appear very comfortably off. They are well clad, and present no signs of suffering from the famine. Both the men and women have remarkably fair complexions and ruddy cheeks, and what surprised me more was the decidedly Tátár cast of their features.

From this we went on down a narrow glen, that, widening gradually, at last expands on to the valley of Gháyn by a long and gentle slope, half-way on which is a roadside ábambár fed by a kárez stream. Before us lay a crowded mass of fruit gardens and mulberry plantations, all in full foliage, and above them rose aloft the high-domed mosque of Gháyn. We passed amongst these walled gardens, and skirting the fortifications of the town, camped on a small rivulet a little way to its west. As we cleared the gardens we came upon a crowd of the townspeople, collected on the roadside to see us pass. They were remarkably well dressed, and conducted themselves with commendable propriety and decorum. Most of them bowed civilly as we rode past, and many raised the hand to the head in military style, whilst a venerable old priest with a flowing beard as white as the turban under the weight of whose capacious folds he was buried, standing apart on a slight eminence with half a dozen acolytes clad in white, offered up a prayer to avert any evil that this first visit of Europeans to their town might entail. The plaintive trembling voice of the old man, echoed by the shrill tones of his young disciples, struck me as peculiarly impressive, but they were unheeded by the crowd, who were much too deeply absorbed in the novel spectacle presented by our party to their eyes for the first time. We were assured that we were the first Europeans who are known to have visited this town, and the statement is supported by the fact that all our maps of the country were wrong as to its proper location, Gháyn being placed to the south of Birjand, whereas the reverse is the case.

Gháyn has a very decayed look, and quite disappoints the expectations raised by the first sight of its gardens and lofty mosque. The town covers a considerable extent of ground enclosed within fortified walls, now everywhere in a state of decay. The area within the walls is capable of containing from eight to ten thousand houses, it is said, though at this time only about fifteen hundred are occupied, corn-fields and gardens occupying the intervals between the ruins of its former mansions. A prominent object of attraction in the town is its lofty domed mosque, which in outward appearance is in keeping with the general look of decay pervading the locality. Its walls, which are supported in their perpendicular by buttress arches built against them laterally, are dangerously cracked from top to bottom, either from original defect of architecture or from the effects of earthquakes. The population is estimated at about eight thousand, amongst whom are many Saggid families, and others of Arab origin. The mass of the people, however, appear to be of Tátár origin, as indicated by the very marked traces of that typical race in their features.